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Happy Halloween!

Halloween seems a little anti-climactic to me this year because this is the first year in sixteen years that no one in my household is trick-or-treating (unless that changes between now and tonight).

We’ve made some really fun costumes…Junior High Kid was the Magic Tree House in second grade. College Student was a recycling bin when he was in third grade. He was a money tree another year, and the World Wide Web the final year he went trick-or-treating.

Junior High Kid will probably take after his brother and attempt to scare small children who venture to our door this evening (“if they don’t make it, the candy is OURS!”). College Student is VERY tall. And quiet. Which has served him well on Halloween. He has this black robe that doesn’t have a face, and glow-in-the-dark skeleton hands. So he’ll put all that on, then go out in our front yard and pace slowly back and forth with a plastic scythe. The first year he did this, I came back after following a younger Junior High Kid and his friends around the neighborhood and was surprised to see how much candy we had left. College Student explained that a lot of kids had seen him and crossed the street…without taking any candy from him.

(My kids ARE nice boys! Really, they are…that first year, I think College Student was a little surprised he’d had that affect on kids who didn’t know him. Of course, that doesn’t explain why he continued to scare small children the following years…but trust me, he is a nice boy!)

The most fun I’ve ever had on Halloween is the first year we moved here. We’re at the end of the neighborhood on a cul-de-sac that backs up to the woods. At that time, there were only four or five houses on our street. So we weren’t getting any trick-or-treaters. We all had little kids. So all of us left a bowl of candy on our doorsteps in case anyone actually came down our way (they would’ve had to walk in the street because the sidewalk ended at our house that year) and we all walked our kids in a big group up to the older part of the neighborhood. Moms, Dads, kids…I may have even brought our dog. We all came home to full bowls of candy on our doorsteps.

That wouldn’t happen now anymore…well, unless the trick-or-treaters refuse to walk past the dementors who are haunting our front yard.